As he steps around it, she looks up forlornly. She has not moved for the last hour. She has been dwelling on her husband’s final words, how she had not been good enough and how in her imperfect efforts she’d corrupted his precious memories of the actual Evelyn. She will never now be able to ask him for his forgiveness. He is gone and she has as much chance of joining him in heaven – if there is even such a thing – as passing through the eye of a needle.
His body remains cradled in her arms. His blood has dried on her skin and clogs her nails; her hair hangs about her face, thickened and darkened with it. The cotton of her nightdress is stained from the ripped collar down to her knees.
‘He’s been shot,’ she says. How can she start to explain what has happened?
Daniels stares. He is struggling to take in the scene. She looks like she has been through a slaughter.
He reaches out to support himself on the door frame.
‘Who did this?’ He looks back out into the hall. ‘Where’re they now?’
She shakes her head, she feels so helpless. ‘His body is in the garden.’ It was she who killed him but she doesn’t know how to put that into words. What do they do with creatures like her who kill humans?
Daniels straightens and staggers into the corridor. She hears him reach the kitchen where he retches in the sink, before going outside through the French windows, letting them bang behind him. His boots crunch over the snow-covered lawn.
After five minutes, he returns to her in the bedroom. ‘Tell me everything,’ he says, ‘from the beginning, and leave nothing out.’
He looks at her in a way he never has before when she describes stabbing the man. She must have severed a major blood vessel because of the huge quantity of blood. When she has finished, he asks her, ‘Have you contacted anyone, like called an ambulance?’
‘I was waiting for you.’ She wonders if he will be angry with her for her lack of initiative and knowledge of what to do. An ambulance would have made no difference, she is certain, but Daniels is not to know that.
‘Good. Then maybe we have a little time. Now get yourself cleaned up, we must leave as soon as possible.’
‘Will you call the police?’
He grunts. ‘That would be unwise I think.’ He holds up a constable’s warrant card in its black wallet. The card behind the plastic is soaked with blood. ‘I found this on that bastard you did for out there.’
PART 2
Terra Incognita
9
Daniels pulls the front door open for her but after crossing the mat, Evie pauses on the threshold. She looks out through the frame at the empty lobby and the gate for the lift. The prohibition against crossing is so deeply inscribed that even now she finds it difficult to break.
There is also the fact that she is leaving behind everything she has known, with the sole exception of Daniels. While she waited with her husband’s body, she had contemplated the inevitability of this moment when she would be cast out, but she is still unprepared.
Daniels stands behind her. She feels his anxiety. ‘Evie?’ he prompts, and putting his hand on her arm, guides her through ahead of him, across the lobby to the elevator door where he pushes the button on the wall.
They listen to the whine of the lift’s motor as it ascends. It arrives and the gate squeaks back.
She steps in and turns around to take a last look at her front door. It is a view of her home she has never had and the foreignness of what should be familiar is disorientating.
Daniels inserts a key in the control panel and pushes a button. The door closes and the box jerks into motion, giving her the queasy sensation that the floor is dropping away, and she puts a hand out against the shiny wall.
As they descend, Daniels stares forward, grim-faced. He is wearing the same clothes as earlier, with the addition of a large grey backpack in which he carries everything they are taking.
There is a mirror on the rear wall and she views her reflection. She can barely recognise herself from the fragment of face exposed between hat and scarf – her eyes wide and nervous and her inquisitive nose poking out mouse-like – and this reinforces the sense of dangerous voyaging into the unknown. Her figure more resembles a small version of Daniels as she is outwardly dressed in his clothes, the most prominent item being a thick three-quarters length coat, its sleeves rolled back into bulky cuffs. On him, the coat reaches no further than his hips but on her it extends below the knees. Under this she wears her own cotton trousers and her only at-all-robust outdoor shoes: a pair of summer loafers with flat heels. On her head she wears one of Daniels’s cloth caps, the band oversized. Wrapped three times around her neck, concealing mouth and chin and hiding her long hair, is one of his old scarves.
Evie resembles a boy and, bulked out by the male clothes, a broad-shouldered one. The impression is undermined only by the light shoes and her slim ankles protruding below the hem of her trousers, making her seem to totter cartoonishly.
Back in the kitchen, Daniels had agonised over her footwear. The loafers, apart from being inappropriate for slush and snow and the long walk in the winter streets ahead, puncture the disguise. He made her try on a pair of his own size-twelve boots, padded with extra socks and with crumpled paper in the toes, but she could not walk without holding onto the counter. What with the coat and the cap she looked like Charlie Chaplin; all she needed was a moustache and a cane.
She turns away from the lift’s mirror and faces the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
‘Why’re you sorry?’ he asks.
‘Because I’m making you leave.’
‘Don’t blame yourself for that. They’re the ones to blame. You didn’t ask for this any more than me.’
‘I suppose,’ she says. Her features tighten. Her husband is lying dead upstairs and the thought she cannot let go of is how he accused her with his last breath.
She shudders it away. ‘How long will it take to get to your daughter’s?’
‘Most of the night. We’re going to have to go on foot. There’s nothing in the way of public transport at this hour and I’ll not risk a cab.’
‘Is it far? Bow?’
‘Five miles if not more and it’ll be hard going in these conditions.’
The lift draws to a sudden halt and she braces her knees and puts her hand against the door. ‘Are we at the bottom already?’ The thirty-four levels have taken less than a minute.
‘Nearly. This is the first floor. We’ll take the stairs from here, it’ll give us a chance to see if there is anyone in reception before coming out. It’ll be best not to be observed.’
The doors jerk back and they step out into a lobby very different to their own. It has three doors instead of one and a corridor leading off with more doors along that. It is illuminated by a single low-energy strip, blinking within a wire cage. The floor is not carpeted but covered with torn vinyl which in front of the lift is worn through to the concrete and between that and the apartment doors is tracked with muddy prints. The ceiling is stained with damp and where water has leaked down the wall, black mould has spread.
Primitive drums thump from along the corridor. A sudden high-pitched skeletal shriek comes from the door behind, petrifying her, so that she recoils hard against the wall.
It is as if they have emerged in quite a different building, even a different world, and the change is terrifying. Daniels had told her that it is unpleasant at street level but she has never really believed his stories, thinking they were his way to make her feel better about being confined.